Actually, the iPhone, while not strictly "original", was a MASSIVE step forward in the smartphone world. At the time, the next best thing was the Treo which came with one of two crappy operating systems, and had a low-rez, stylus based touchscreen. At the time, watching SJ's keynote announcing and demonstrating the iPhone was a gigantic "Holy Shit I Want One!" moment for people like me who were trying to make real use of the smartphones of the time and being constantly frustrated by their limitations. (It wasn't yet known how ridiculously locked down the iPhone ecosystem was going to turn out to be.)
The tech in the iPhone may not have been Apple's invention, but it's not like you could just run down to your local Verizon store and buy anything remotely similar at the time. That part was all Apple.
And, no, I'm not an Apple fan-boy. I had a 1st gen iPhone and won't ever have another. But credit's gotta go where credit's due. And, yes, anyone enjoying their Android phone today probably owes Apple a big thanks. Smartphones wouldn't be anywhere near where they are today had the iPhone not changed the rules of the game.
Only thing I was interested in was, can you take the SIM out and will it work in another device?
And also what are the details of the account associated with it? How much data will you be able to download with it? On what date does the account end and the sim becomes useless?
You don't "need" electronics. Particularly if all you care about is that the final product have some alcohol content.
Something like this is handy for when you want to produce the best product you can, and even more importantly, when you want to be able to consistently produce a beer that tastes the same from batch to batch.
Fermentation temperatures can have a large effect on the taste of a finished beer. Even from the exact same recipe you can have very different tasting products from summer to winter if they're fermenting in some random closet in your house.
Having precise temperature control means being able to produce the exact same product, reliably, over and over again.
An armed revolution will not work with the bullets we all carry. When 500,000+ armed drones are constantly flying overhead, armored vehicles, armored traitorous thugs, what are 9mm bullets really going to do? Has it helped the 100,000s of dead Iraqis with their AK-47s? Our ammo is only good at killing ourselves and they know it. Before you go off and do something stupid, think it through thoroughly. If there is going to be any success in a revolution it is going to involve specialized knowledge and organization. If you want to be useful and actually do something to help the fight when it comes, educate yourself as much as possible.
Asking an American soldier to fire on Iraqis is a whole different animal than asking that soldier to fire on his neighbors. The corrupt powers that be might give the order to fire, but the actual guys with their fingers on the triggers, or at the controls of the drones, won't be so likely to follow that order.
The American military wouldn't be nearly as effective against a revolution as many folks seem to believe.
Just yesterday I had to return a 1TB external drive to Best Buy that actually contained somebody's old 80GB drive in the enclosure.
As if I wasn't pissed off enough at the hassle, and the fact that I believed I was buying a new drive and not a return, I also had to argue for 20 minutes and call in a store manager because they accused ME of being the one who made the swap.
Another thing to consider is damages. Unless you registered the works, you can only sue for actual damages IIRC.
IANAL, but from a logical standpoint, he has suffered actual damages. The CC only makes the work free for non-commercial use. His actual damages are the loss of whatever fee he has set for commercial use. (And, of course he had a figure in mind long before this came up. *wink*) Say, $1000 per image per use.
Also, the legal process could be simplified by following the idea mentioned above. Send them an invoice. Now it's not a copyright infringement case, it's simply collecting an unpaid bill.
I would also think that this would be exactly the sort of thing that the EFF might want to pitch in and help with. It would be a great opportunity for them to establish the enforceability of the CC license in court.
I've read about those experiments, and quite a few others like them.
The problem is that as interesting as they are, none seem to offer a loophole around causality. They can't be used to transfer information FTL. So basically, they're more in the "neat trick" category than any indication that the prohibition against FTL travel might be incorrect.
And, as you said, matter and energy are very different problems. Transferring information AT the speed of light isn't even difficult. A 2 year old playing with the TV remote is transmitting information at light speed.
And yet we can't move even the tiniest of particles of matter at the speed of light. Look at the billions of dollars worth of hardware it takes just to get a microscopic particle to "near light speed".
And I think that most of us can agree that as useful as FTL communication may be, it's moving matter, in particular *people*, FTL that we're all really interested in.
Humanity will, one day, pay dearly the fact that scientists are forced to fight for resources...
Quite the opposite. Given that we have finite resources, the competition amongst scientific groups helps to assure, at least to some degree, that those resources are deployed in the most productive manner.
There are a whole lot more variables than size to consider.
Definitely.
Another one I wonder about is just how necessary a large moon is? Earth is fairly unusual in just how large our moon is compared to the planet it orbits. This gives our oceans strong tides.
Without those strong tides sloshing the water around, would life have formed in still, stagnant pools of water? If it did, would it have spread? Evolved?
As the speed it would take to get nearby stars in a short period of time is just not physically possible no matter how advanced you are and no civilization has yet wanted to spend 500 years getting here.
There are quite a few stars inside a sphere centered on the Earth with a radius of 100 light years. If we could achieve travel at one-half C, that's a lot of stars that could be reached within 50 years. Sure, you would need a really damn good reason to get many people to sign up for that trip, but it's still possible.
But what about a species with a 2000 year life span? All of a sudden that 50 year journey starts to sound much more reasonable. For humans, it represents over half of our short little lives, but for another species it may not be analogous to the journey undertaken by those who left Europe to colonize the Americas.
The entire notion of interstellar travel being infeasible breaks down as soon as you allow for species with longer lifespans than our own.
Why is faster-then-light impossible? (Yes I know about general relativity and for an object to accelerate to C you need infinite time and energy, but lets set that aside)
The thing is, you CAN'T set that aside. That would be like setting aside gravity while trying to design the first airplane. If you ignore gravity, then you end up with an airplane that doesn't work. What you have to do is accept gravity, and find a way to work around it.
Same with FTL. Our current method of going faster is to simply accelerate more. General relativity tells us that that approach won't work even for reaching C, much less exceeding it.
So, we need a workaround.
A pet hypothesis of mine is that perhaps as an object with mass approaches C, conventional laws of physics break down and we need a whole new set of physics to figure out what happens at those velocities. This would be somewhat analogous to how conventional physics cease to apply to very, very small things, thus the need for quantum physics. Sadly, this is little more than a convenient fantasy. The empirical evidence strongly suggests that traveling at or above C is, indeed, impossible.
So all we're left with is the hope that we can achieve travel in a way that is effectively faster than C, but not actually faster than C. We need to find a way to create a shortcut, to actually decrease the distance between two points so that we can make the journey quickly, while never having to exceed the speed of light. This is where ideas like wormholes, space folding, and warp drive come in to play....
Those ideas seem to be "possible", at least in the sense that they don't violate what we know about physics. The problem is that we are far, far away from being able to harness the amounts of energy required to make them happen. The entire output of our sun, over its entire lifetime "might" be enough energy to make a short one-way trip using one of these methods.
The ability to harness that amount of energy is a long, long way off. The ability to do it with equipment that is portable enough to allow us to return home is farther still.....
I used to do the in-home thing on the side several years back. Even at $100 an hour for regular home users, I had enough business going that I could almost have quit my day job.
But, you're right. Home users whine way, way too much. They also have no concept of "business hours". They don't think twice about calling you at 10:00 pm to ask why some website won't load. They also seem to honestly and truly believe that their blown power supply is your fault because you installed Office on their computer 6 weeks ago ("Well OF COURSE I expect you to fix it for free! You broke my computer you son of a bitch!").
In the end, I decided that while the money was pretty decent, my sanity was more valuable.
In reality you'll find that she just wants you to get her computer running so she can fire up her web cam and cyber with the dude she met in some chat room a few days ago. And she'll jabber on and on about how great he is the whole time you're there.
If you're lucky, she'll have beer in the fridge and offer you one or two while you work, but that's about all you can realistically hope for.
But be sure to get the name of that chat room before you leave!:-)
In the rare instances that I do agree to help someone out, NEVER, under any circumstances do I do phone support. I'm not going to spend 10 minutes explaining to someone how to find the information that I need when I could see it in a split second if the computer was in front of me.
If you want me to work on your computer, and by some miracle I agree, then you will drop it off at my house, and I'll get to it at my convenience. It may be awhile. If you need it in the next day or two, try Geek Squad. If you don't mind waiting, I think I have some free time the weekend after next......
For the folks (family and friends) that seem to think I'm a free computer repair store
I have way too many people like that in my life.
I imagine they all think my talents have been dwindling over the years. These days, more often than not, I just tell them that I wouldn't have the slightest clue what to do about their problem (even if it's an easy one).
When I was young and single, it didn't bother me so much. But now I have a wife and kids that I like to spend my free time with, so I've decided to discourage the behavior by simply being entirely useless anytime anyone calls with a computer problem.
These days you only get my services if you: 1) Live in my house 2) Raised me 3) Sign my paychecks.
Often times when a drive fails it's not the physical mechanism that goes bad, it's something on the circuit board. If you can find an identical drive (should be pretty easy in a corporate environment, could be tricky for a home user), just carefully remove the board from the good drive and install it on the bad one. You'd be surprised how many times that "totally dead" hard drive will start working like new.
The software solutions are great for some situations, but they can't do anything if the drive isn't even visible to them.
And pretty much unenforceable. "Sorry sir, I forgot it." "Oh ya, I forgot about that account."
Apparently you've never been on parole. An answer like "Sorry, I forgot" just lands you back in a cell. When you're under supervision, you're not allowed to forget things, and you're not allowed to make mistakes. The only acceptable mode of behavior is absolute perfection.
If someone was forgetful like that, the powers that be wouldn't be the least bit shy about locking them back up.
That said, it's still unenforceable, because it would never come to that. There is no link between my slashdot username and my real name. Even with subpoenas, there is no way to take "slashdot user bonehead" and trace it back to my real identity. (well, technically, you could trace me by IP, but if I was pulling anything illegal, that would only lead you to one of my many neighbors who are silly enough to run open access points. Or the hotel down the block that has open wifi. All of which my laptop can connect to from my living toom.)
Natural gas is a good alternative, as long as you can rely on the source.
A major advantage to natural gas is that it typically stays available during electrical outages. Gas stations around here can't sell you gas when the power is out, so if you underestimated how much to stockpile, you may end up with a shiny new generator that becomes useless when you need it most.
Re:Amazing what happens when you're asleep
on
Sleep Mailing
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· Score: 1
Yeah, I have thought about it. In fact, I'm still thinking about it.
I have some anesthesia issues that make surgery *slightly* more dangerous for me than for most people, but with a good doctor in charge, that's a manageable risk. And, my apnea is fairly mild, compared to what I've heard that other people are going through. It doesn't disable me, it just means I need a good 14 to 16 hours of sleep to actually wake up feeling refreshed.
It's inconvenient and unpleasant, but I'm still on the fence as to whether the risks of surgery would be worth it.
Maybe in a few years if they improve the technique and can give me better odds that it will actually help.
Slashdot Mirror
Has apple ever made anything original.
Actually, the iPhone, while not strictly "original", was a MASSIVE step forward in the smartphone world. At the time, the next best thing was the Treo which came with one of two crappy operating systems, and had a low-rez, stylus based touchscreen. At the time, watching SJ's keynote announcing and demonstrating the iPhone was a gigantic "Holy Shit I Want One!" moment for people like me who were trying to make real use of the smartphones of the time and being constantly frustrated by their limitations. (It wasn't yet known how ridiculously locked down the iPhone ecosystem was going to turn out to be.)
The tech in the iPhone may not have been Apple's invention, but it's not like you could just run down to your local Verizon store and buy anything remotely similar at the time. That part was all Apple.
And, no, I'm not an Apple fan-boy. I had a 1st gen iPhone and won't ever have another. But credit's gotta go where credit's due. And, yes, anyone enjoying their Android phone today probably owes Apple a big thanks. Smartphones wouldn't be anywhere near where they are today had the iPhone not changed the rules of the game.
How exactly is this a scam?
What exactly will I lose if I fall for it? And what would falling for it entail?
I'm a little unclear on what the scam part is here.....
Only thing I was interested in was, can you take the SIM out and will it work in another device?
And also what are the details of the account associated with it? How much data will you be able to download with it? On what date does the account end and the sim becomes useless?
You don't "need" electronics. Particularly if all you care about is that the final product have some alcohol content.
Something like this is handy for when you want to produce the best product you can, and even more importantly, when you want to be able to consistently produce a beer that tastes the same from batch to batch.
Fermentation temperatures can have a large effect on the taste of a finished beer. Even from the exact same recipe you can have very different tasting products from summer to winter if they're fermenting in some random closet in your house.
Having precise temperature control means being able to produce the exact same product, reliably, over and over again.
200 light years away would make it a 400 year round trip for radio communications.
Where did you come up with 800?
Don't forget this one: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arecibo_message
There have been many intentional messages sent.
The ones whose names appear on TV with either an (R) or a (D) next to them, for starters.
An armed revolution will not work with the bullets we all carry. When 500,000+ armed drones are constantly flying overhead, armored vehicles, armored traitorous thugs, what are 9mm bullets really going to do? Has it helped the 100,000s of dead Iraqis with their AK-47s? Our ammo is only good at killing ourselves and they know it.
Before you go off and do something stupid, think it through thoroughly.
If there is going to be any success in a revolution it is going to involve specialized knowledge and organization. If you want to be useful and actually do something to help the fight when it comes, educate yourself as much as possible.
Asking an American soldier to fire on Iraqis is a whole different animal than asking that soldier to fire on his neighbors. The corrupt powers that be might give the order to fire, but the actual guys with their fingers on the triggers, or at the controls of the drones, won't be so likely to follow that order.
The American military wouldn't be nearly as effective against a revolution as many folks seem to believe.
Heh...
Just yesterday I had to return a 1TB external drive to Best Buy that actually contained somebody's old 80GB drive in the enclosure.
As if I wasn't pissed off enough at the hassle, and the fact that I believed I was buying a new drive and not a return, I also had to argue for 20 minutes and call in a store manager because they accused ME of being the one who made the swap.
People are bastards.
Another thing to consider is damages. Unless you registered the works, you can only sue for actual damages IIRC.
IANAL, but from a logical standpoint, he has suffered actual damages. The CC only makes the work free for non-commercial use. His actual damages are the loss of whatever fee he has set for commercial use. (And, of course he had a figure in mind long before this came up. *wink*) Say, $1000 per image per use.
Also, the legal process could be simplified by following the idea mentioned above. Send them an invoice. Now it's not a copyright infringement case, it's simply collecting an unpaid bill.
I would also think that this would be exactly the sort of thing that the EFF might want to pitch in and help with. It would be a great opportunity for them to establish the enforceability of the CC license in court.
I've read about those experiments, and quite a few others like them.
The problem is that as interesting as they are, none seem to offer a loophole around causality. They can't be used to transfer information FTL. So basically, they're more in the "neat trick" category than any indication that the prohibition against FTL travel might be incorrect.
And, as you said, matter and energy are very different problems. Transferring information AT the speed of light isn't even difficult. A 2 year old playing with the TV remote is transmitting information at light speed.
And yet we can't move even the tiniest of particles of matter at the speed of light. Look at the billions of dollars worth of hardware it takes just to get a microscopic particle to "near light speed".
And I think that most of us can agree that as useful as FTL communication may be, it's moving matter, in particular *people*, FTL that we're all really interested in.
Humanity will, one day, pay dearly the fact that scientists are forced to fight for resources...
Quite the opposite. Given that we have finite resources, the competition amongst scientific groups helps to assure, at least to some degree, that those resources are deployed in the most productive manner.
There are a whole lot more variables than size to consider.
Definitely.
Another one I wonder about is just how necessary a large moon is? Earth is fairly unusual in just how large our moon is compared to the planet it orbits. This gives our oceans strong tides.
Without those strong tides sloshing the water around, would life have formed in still, stagnant pools of water? If it did, would it have spread? Evolved?
As the speed it would take to get nearby stars in a short period of time is just not physically possible no matter how advanced you are and no civilization has yet wanted to spend 500 years getting here.
There are quite a few stars inside a sphere centered on the Earth with a radius of 100 light years. If we could achieve travel at one-half C, that's a lot of stars that could be reached within 50 years. Sure, you would need a really damn good reason to get many people to sign up for that trip, but it's still possible.
But what about a species with a 2000 year life span? All of a sudden that 50 year journey starts to sound much more reasonable. For humans, it represents over half of our short little lives, but for another species it may not be analogous to the journey undertaken by those who left Europe to colonize the Americas.
The entire notion of interstellar travel being infeasible breaks down as soon as you allow for species with longer lifespans than our own.
Why is faster-then-light impossible? (Yes I know about general relativity and for an object to accelerate to C you need infinite time and energy, but lets set that aside)
The thing is, you CAN'T set that aside. That would be like setting aside gravity while trying to design the first airplane. If you ignore gravity, then you end up with an airplane that doesn't work. What you have to do is accept gravity, and find a way to work around it.
Same with FTL. Our current method of going faster is to simply accelerate more. General relativity tells us that that approach won't work even for reaching C, much less exceeding it.
So, we need a workaround.
A pet hypothesis of mine is that perhaps as an object with mass approaches C, conventional laws of physics break down and we need a whole new set of physics to figure out what happens at those velocities. This would be somewhat analogous to how conventional physics cease to apply to very, very small things, thus the need for quantum physics. Sadly, this is little more than a convenient fantasy. The empirical evidence strongly suggests that traveling at or above C is, indeed, impossible.
So all we're left with is the hope that we can achieve travel in a way that is effectively faster than C, but not actually faster than C. We need to find a way to create a shortcut, to actually decrease the distance between two points so that we can make the journey quickly, while never having to exceed the speed of light. This is where ideas like wormholes, space folding, and warp drive come in to play....
Those ideas seem to be "possible", at least in the sense that they don't violate what we know about physics. The problem is that we are far, far away from being able to harness the amounts of energy required to make them happen. The entire output of our sun, over its entire lifetime "might" be enough energy to make a short one-way trip using one of these methods.
The ability to harness that amount of energy is a long, long way off. The ability to do it with equipment that is portable enough to allow us to return home is farther still.....
I used to do the in-home thing on the side several years back. Even at $100 an hour for regular home users, I had enough business going that I could almost have quit my day job.
But, you're right. Home users whine way, way too much. They also have no concept of "business hours". They don't think twice about calling you at 10:00 pm to ask why some website won't load. They also seem to honestly and truly believe that their blown power supply is your fault because you installed Office on their computer 6 weeks ago ("Well OF COURSE I expect you to fix it for free! You broke my computer you son of a bitch!").
In the end, I decided that while the money was pretty decent, my sanity was more valuable.
When did this start? I had to do this at home not to long ago to save some data from a relatively recent 500GB drive. That worked out fine.
I'm not doubting you, just curious.
Doesn't work out that way.
In reality you'll find that she just wants you to get her computer running so she can fire up her web cam and cyber with the dude she met in some chat room a few days ago. And she'll jabber on and on about how great he is the whole time you're there.
If you're lucky, she'll have beer in the fridge and offer you one or two while you work, but that's about all you can realistically hope for.
But be sure to get the name of that chat room before you leave! :-)
Oh, I almost forgot the most important policy.
In the rare instances that I do agree to help someone out, NEVER, under any circumstances do I do phone support. I'm not going to spend 10 minutes explaining to someone how to find the information that I need when I could see it in a split second if the computer was in front of me.
If you want me to work on your computer, and by some miracle I agree, then you will drop it off at my house, and I'll get to it at my convenience. It may be awhile. If you need it in the next day or two, try Geek Squad. If you don't mind waiting, I think I have some free time the weekend after next......
Not to be a smartass, but...
For the folks (family and friends) that seem to think I'm a free computer repair store
I have way too many people like that in my life.
I imagine they all think my talents have been dwindling over the years. These days, more often than not, I just tell them that I wouldn't have the slightest clue what to do about their problem (even if it's an easy one).
When I was young and single, it didn't bother me so much. But now I have a wife and kids that I like to spend my free time with, so I've decided to discourage the behavior by simply being entirely useless anytime anyone calls with a computer problem.
These days you only get my services if you:
1) Live in my house
2) Raised me
3) Sign my paychecks.
Here's one that's saved my butt several times.
Often times when a drive fails it's not the physical mechanism that goes bad, it's something on the circuit board. If you can find an identical drive (should be pretty easy in a corporate environment, could be tricky for a home user), just carefully remove the board from the good drive and install it on the bad one. You'd be surprised how many times that "totally dead" hard drive will start working like new.
The software solutions are great for some situations, but they can't do anything if the drive isn't even visible to them.
The movie Aliens.
And pretty much unenforceable. "Sorry sir, I forgot it." "Oh ya, I forgot about that account."
Apparently you've never been on parole. An answer like "Sorry, I forgot" just lands you back in a cell. When you're under supervision, you're not allowed to forget things, and you're not allowed to make mistakes. The only acceptable mode of behavior is absolute perfection.
If someone was forgetful like that, the powers that be wouldn't be the least bit shy about locking them back up.
That said, it's still unenforceable, because it would never come to that. There is no link between my slashdot username and my real name. Even with subpoenas, there is no way to take "slashdot user bonehead" and trace it back to my real identity. (well, technically, you could trace me by IP, but if I was pulling anything illegal, that would only lead you to one of my many neighbors who are silly enough to run open access points. Or the hotel down the block that has open wifi. All of which my laptop can connect to from my living toom.)
Natural gas is a good alternative, as long as you can rely on the source.
A major advantage to natural gas is that it typically stays available during electrical outages. Gas stations around here can't sell you gas when the power is out, so if you underestimated how much to stockpile, you may end up with a shiny new generator that becomes useless when you need it most.
Yeah, I have thought about it. In fact, I'm still thinking about it.
I have some anesthesia issues that make surgery *slightly* more dangerous for me than for most people, but with a good doctor in charge, that's a manageable risk. And, my apnea is fairly mild, compared to what I've heard that other people are going through. It doesn't disable me, it just means I need a good 14 to 16 hours of sleep to actually wake up feeling refreshed.
It's inconvenient and unpleasant, but I'm still on the fence as to whether the risks of surgery would be worth it.
Maybe in a few years if they improve the technique and can give me better odds that it will actually help.